Stopping Profit Leakage with Torus, payabl., and Raiffeisen Bank International

Kirill Lisitsyn, CEO at Torus, Breno Oliveira, Chief Product Officer at payabl., and Mariia Komissarova, Head of Data & AI Delivery at Raiffeisen Bank International, dive into the hidden challenge of profit leakage that often plagues financial institutions. The panel highlights how, at a high level, many businesses appear healthy on paper, but a deeper look often reveals that they are unintentionally losing money on specific transactions or client segments.

Torus explains that this leakage often occurs because data aggregation isn’t granular enough to catch loss-making patterns at the merchant or transaction level, suggesting that institutions need to stop simply chasing cost optimisation and instead look at revenue opportunities, such as re-pricing or identifying segments that are actually quite profitable. This allows for more competitive and lucrative business strategies. Oliveira adds that static routing is another frequently overlooked culprit, noting that merchants often have outdated routing configurations that aren’t revisited until a problem arises, and advocates for dynamic routing, which can drive significant performance improvements.

When the conversation shifts to the internal barriers preventing these fixes, Komissarova identifies the primary hurdle as a mental one, rather than a technological one; arguing that companies already possess the necessary tools, but the real issue is how data is managed. Raiffeisen Bank International emphasises that data should be treated as an asset by the product teams who actually own the business, rather than being siloed away in an IT department. This approach requires an agile transformation in data culture, where teams share readable data across the organisation to unlock collective value.

payabl. agrees, stressing that the core issue is ownership and notes that without a single team owning the process, risk, finance, and product teams often operate in silos, making it difficult to hold anyone responsible for necessary changes. Torus echoes this by pointing to institutional inertia; it is often easier for long-standing teams to maintain the status quo than to challenge processes that have been in place for years. To overcome these barriers, Raiffeisen Bank International concludes that leadership support is essential and argues that top management must prioritize data literacy and shift the internal perspective from product-based profitability to client-based profitability.